|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Thousands Fleeing Hugo Chavez's Venezuela
Each day after dawn, hundreds of Venezuelans gather outside the Spanish Consulate in Caracas, hoping to get papers allowing them to flee the South American country for Spain. Others form long lines at other consulates, equally fearful of the future of Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez. Two months after Chavez was re-elected to another six-year term, the National Assembly is entrusting him with wide-ranging powers that will allow him to dictate new laws for 18 months.
Among its major moves, the government has announced that it will nationalize telecommunications and electric utilities and other strategic industries, decline to renew the broadcast license of RCTV television – which officials allege supported a coup against Chavez in 2002 – and amend the constitution to remove presidential term limits, allowing Chavez to repeatedly seek re-election.
"What we're seeing happen here is not good," Jose Manuel Rodriguez, 42, an accountant seeking travel documents at the Spanish Consulate, told the Washington Post.
"What we see here is the coming of totalitarianism, fewer guarantees, fewer civil rights. I want to have everything ready to leave."
Story Continues Below
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, said in a statement this week: "We should all be concerned about the direction President Chavez is taking his country.
"Any leader who tries to tighten his grip on power by destroying the institutions of democracy, curtailing press freedom and using his office to intimidate pro-democracy opponents is setting in motion a dangerous process with potentially ominous consequences."
Some Venezuelans who are fleeing the country are opting for residence in the U.S., according to the Miami Herald. "The latest figures show a surge of Venezuelans moving to the United States either through asylum, permanent residence or other visas,” the Herald reported.
"Those who seek asylum are claiming persecution or that communism is about to take hold in Venezuela.”
Venezuelan government officials insist that "the president's moves are the will of the people and that his latest electoral victory is a mandate for Chavez to deepen what he calls his Bolivarian revolution,” the Post reports.
But a recent survey in Venezuela by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Washington, D.C. polling firm, found that a strong majority of Venezuelans oppose the plan to remove presidential term limits and the decision not to renew RCTV's license.
Mark Feierstein, a political adviser with the polling firm, said the survey "suggests Chavistas are uncomfortable with some of this and, more importantly, it shows that Chavez is misinterpreting his mandate."
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved. Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |